Microsoft is investigating purchasing Barnes & Noble’s entire digital book business. According to documents obtained by TechCrunch, Microsoft is investigating the outright purchase of Nook Business from it’s current partner Barnes & Noble.

Reportedly, Microsoft would purchase Nook Media’s digital business which currently includes the Nook tablet itself as well as the Nook e-book market for periodicals, and text books as well as fiction and non fiction writing. While the purchase would include the Nook tablet division, it seems Nook already has plans to discontinue it’s dedicated tablets in favor of partnering with other devices sometime in 2014. The company doesn’t seem to have any plans to discontinue it’s dedicated e-readers.

These documents indicate a possible purchase price of at $1 billion dollars, well below the $1.8 billion Nook Media was valued at earlier this year. If the purchase comes to fruition it would be Microsoft’s latest move to shore up holes in it’s digital content offerings. Currently it offers music, television shows and movies to through Xbox Music and Xbox Video, and games through Xbox proper. Adding Nook to the fold would complete Microsoft’s digital media offerings.

One Comment on “Microsoft Investigating the Outright Purchase of Nook”

  1. With B&N announcing a scaled back effort for Nook hardware, it would certainly make sense. The one thing that MS really lacks, is an eBook source. I’m not a huge eBook reader, but I do reference them occassionally, but still lots of people love eBooks and I would really like to see a WinRT based Nook tablet of some kind. I would also like to see eBooks in the Windows/Windows Phone store.

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